What exactly IS a White Mage?

[Lastelli]

I think the way to improve lillies might be to have it not reduce cooldowns at all. Have it proc of Stone/Aero in some way (either perhaps every second stone or some other way that means it can proc of Stone but not at the same rate we get lillies from Cure/Cure II). Each lily then grants a bonus to critical hit chance for all abilities and is spent when you next get a critical hit (not sure what numbers would be best for this feeling powerful but not overpowered). This way lillies are still a passive ability that doesn't require being micromanaged (and thus WHM retains it's identity as the healer that doesn't have a fiddly gimmick), with the lillies doing something quite useful (making WHM just crit more than the other healers- an ability which is useful both for healing and dealing damage). Later oGCD's could be things along the lines of "spend lillies to guarantee next ability use is a critical hit", or even simply "immediately get three lillies".

I absolutely love this. Very nice idea, this would reward good play, increasing your healing output as you deal more damage and wouldn't increase the job's complexity. And you can also plan around it if they give us something like reassemble, to be used only with 3 lilies. So many good suggestions on the forum...and somehow the devs always succeed in making some very questionable choices...sigh

[Ssmiley_Bjakkzz]

Helluuu White Magie is Hoooooooooooooly Shit!

[Gemina]

I absolutely love this. Very nice idea, this would reward good play, increasing your healing output as you deal more damage and wouldn't increase the job's complexity. And you can also plan around it if they give us something like reassemble, to be used only with 3 lilies. So many good suggestions on the forum...and somehow the devs always succeed in making some very questionable choices...sigh

I'm in favor of lilies increasing potencies across the board on spells. A healer version of Greased Lightning I suppose. Ability potencies would stay the same. Reductions no longer reduced, but abilities also don't cost lilies. I think lily procs could actually be tied to ogcd usage, which means the more the WHM relies on these, the stronger the WHM gets both restoratively and offensively. Now all that is needed is the incentive to get the WHM to spend the lilies.

I would be very happy playing this version of WHM. Just needs the right potency adjustments so it doesn't become a MNK with heals.

[zuzu-bq]

The dungeon dude.

[Tint]

I'm in favor of lilies increasing potencies across the board on spells. A healer version of Greased Lightning I suppose. Ability potencies would stay the same. Reductions no longer reduced, but abilities also don't cost lilies. I think lily procs could actually be tied to ogcd usage, which means the more the WHM relies on these, the stronger the WHM gets both restoratively and offensively. Now all that is needed is the incentive to get the WHM to spend the lilies.

I would be very happy playing this version of WHM. Just needs the right potency adjustments so it doesn't become a MNK with heals.

This also sounds a lot like 2.0 WAR. The passive healbuff was originally tied to the Wrath stacks. No stacks, no healbuff. So you had to decide to either hold on the stacks for the buff or spend the stacks on your skills.

They changed this in 2.1... o.ô;


However, the best incentive to spend the lilies would be off-gcd heals, because using them means you can cast more dps skills.

I think lilies could procc by the amount of potency you healed, regardless of source. 1000 potency = 1 lily (AoE heal potency should be considered lower for this, so you don't procc dozens of lilies with only one heal). Rework Plenary Indulgence again, remove the stupid proccs you get from healing people and let it consume lilies instead. Remove the cooldown as well. 1 lily = weak single target off-gcd heal, 2 lilys = strong off-gcd heal, 3 lilys = strong off-gcd heal on target but also an aoe heal around yourself.

[Metsonm]

The dungeon dude.

The thing is that Scholar is pretty consistently faster in dungeons runs across pretty much all skill levels. Swallow's compass seems to swap between all three as you go from 99th to 25th percentile, but more often than not Scholar provides faster clear times. There are a couple instances where a white mage is significantly faster than a scholar, but that's usually coupled with AST being right on their heels.

Overall, dungeons are pretty balanced in terms of healers, though, so I don't think it's fair to say White Mages excel in that regard.

[Grimoire-M]

It depends on the ability for me tbh. I think Tetra should get its cooldown reduced rather than get any potency adjustments. It's WHM's goto emergency heal, but the current cooldown it has makes it absurdly weak in throughput relative to the other healers. Benediction shouldn't really change and should ignore Lilies entirely.

Assize could benefit from increased potency. Asylum could either be more potency or more duration. Benison I think should be weaker without it (not by much) but still increase to be better. Maybe become AoE at a certain stack count. I feel that PI should be reworked to be tied to it as well, essentially granting the current buff, but it would trigger itself when the corresponding player took damage and be usable when you wanted instead of needing to spam heals to get it at all. This makes it more predictive in nature but still a strong heal. The number of stacks granted would be based on Lily count.

If we're looking for a filler damage cooldown, let Fluid Aura deal damage again and get more potency from each Lily.

My worry with the Benison and PI changes is that they'd get too absurd, and perhaps having them both share cooldowns with each other and Fluid Aura would be better overall.

I don't feel making Lilies generate from stone spells is a bad idea at all, but again, it has to be done via a combo with itself. It can't be RNG as that goes against what healers want out of their kit, consistency, and options. I agree that it can't be totally on demand either. It needs some gating to it. Hence, a combo. Using any other spell will break it which acts as a natural limiter. You're always going to use Aero II/III too, They would only generate lilies at a static rate rather than one that's adapted to the fight itself. Making all of the direct heals all generate it as well ensures you have them generating still in emergencies, and in all likelihood they would be replaced with Stone spells anyways in an ideal situation, so all in all, it fits.

[Erakir]

The likelihood of seeing lilies from DPS spells is, simply put, not high. Possible, but...

Much as I wouldn't have a problem with it, I don't see Square putting any emphasis on DPS spells for healers. Have seen other healers in threads immediately shoot down this idea as they'd feel it 'encourages' them to DPS more. At best, it'd be an option alongside other generation. I continue to think putting a chance to generate a lily on regen ticks is the thing that makes the most sense as it encourages proper use of regen and every WHM should be doing it - that'd give an amount of incoming lilies (maybe average 2 a minute from a single regen, who knows, numbers adjustable). It would keep some variance in it too.

As it stands (again there are numerous ways to rework lilies), another one I'd put forth is simply to tie a passive spell speed or crit % to the number of lilies stacked, and change their consumption to improve the potency of abilities they affect. Because benison is percentage based, I'd just straight up remove it from lilies entirely - you're not gonna miss that 1.5s CD reduction you sometimes get on it. As an example, say lilies gave passive spell speed of 5, 10, and 20% (or crit, but using haste for this writeup) - but wait, 20% permanent spell speed, wouldn't that be OP, you might say?

Well, no - not really. If a white mage went completely without using Assize, Tetra, and Asylum, their DPS would shoot into #1 and would teeter some on the raid DPS numbers an AST or SCH brings. And then you'd boot them from a raid, because they never used an OGCD in order to keep that haste stacked. Not happening, these abilities are too important especially since they can be used on the move - but it does lead to some neat little things of maybe holding onto some lilies for a burst phase, same as you might pop Presence of Mind for it. And wouldn't you know it, WHM has the extra MP to capitalize on extra consumption from spell speed.

Has the benefit of increasing your heal throughput when you really need to be healing if you're spamming cures, or just increases DPS passively. I know, we dislike spell speed as a stat, but a straight up haste buff is something else. Or you can do the same thing with crit instead of haste - that might better fit the WHM 'idea' of not being the quick time-speedy healer. I like haste since it plays off WHMs bigger MP resources, but whichever.

I'd then say consuming the lilies oughta simply buff potencies of abilities by, heck, 10, 25, 50%. They already use CD reduction in PvP because it is VERY useful there. We know why CD reduction is extremely meh in PvE - but you know what isn't? Extra throughput for constantly utilized abilities that don't necessarily hit super hard already. And it's easy to code. For the powerhouse raw healer, at that. Sure, tetra would be more useful on a shorter CD rather than gaining some strength here or there, but it's okay - it's fine for WHM's version of lustrate to have its drawback. Quite frankly I don't see a problem with a 3 stack assize doing 450 potency, an asylum healing for 150 potency, or a minute long tetra being 1050 potency, considering you had to build up some lilies. I don't see it as a problem anywhere. As things stand most of these get used with no more than 1 lily in raids. This by far isn't what I'd ultimately like, but it's something I feel would at least work decently.

Along with all this, I'd just throw the same % passive enmity reduction based on lilies you have, cause WHM is already on the edge here to begin with and doesn't need to be pushed even further there.

But this is just one among many many many suggestions we've all seen, though I tried to keep it as one that doesn't change too much from the current lily system - gaining them in similar ways, spending them in similar ways with effects they've coded before, and tacking on buffs to having lilies to begin with. It's still an extremely passive system that doesn't change how the job is played much, aside from potentially making you think a bit more on when to use OGCDs. I'd much rather a huge redesign to begin with, but /shrug.

[zuzu-bq]

The thing is that Scholar is pretty consistently faster in dungeons runs across pretty much all skill levels. Swallow's compass seems to swap between all three as you go from 99th to 25th percentile, but more often than not Scholar provides faster clear times. There are a couple instances where a white mage is significantly faster than a scholar, but that's usually coupled with AST being right on their heels.

Overall, dungeons are pretty balanced in terms of healers, though, so I don't think it's fair to say White Mages excel in that regard.

I'd say healers are pretty balanced in general for PUG and progression, this raid tier just happens to value AST's unique skills more (Star and Synastry). As for dungeons: really hard to say which healer is consistently faster on dungeons since the community of dungeon speedrunning just started to grow a bit more recently. But going from current rankings been on top of the fastest runs for the majority of the dungeons. I meant to say they're the dungeon dude in regards that their toolkit is the most versitile on dungeons, having big aoe damage tools, strong regens, multiple ogcd single target and even the massive aoe stun that is holy.

That aside, for raids WHM is just the easy to pick up easy to learn healer that happened to underperform now because SE kept buffing SCH non-stop. The better SCH becomes the stronger AST gets because raid healing is about combining both healer's toolkits. And the finishing blow were AST QoL that ended up being straight buffs. WHM's idendity as the simple healer is somewhat fine, the problem is that this identity depends of the other two healers not being too strong, which wasn't the case by the end of Heavensward and the same happened again by the end of Stormblood.

What I agree is that, if SE can't keep WHM as the actual healer powerhouse, they should look for a different playstyle design to fit them in. Making them have strong GCD heals is not a good choice when you just give stronger OGCDs to the other healers and have all of them pretty much the same on all GCDs. Specially when the mentality of healers been more and more to avoid GCD healing for the past two years.

[Lastelli]

The likelihood of seeing lilies from DPS spells is, simply put, not high. Possible, but...

Much as I wouldn't have a problem with it, I don't see Square putting any emphasis on DPS spells for healers.

Why not?

SCH: the aetherpact gauge is mostly filled using energy drains (dps);
AST: weaving cards and healing abilities was made easier by shortening malefic 3 cast time (dps).

It is pretty obvious to me that at this point SE finally acknowledged that healers are supposed to dps, to the point that doing dps is beneficial both for AST and SCH from a gameplay perspective.